Widely praised for both his
nature-writing and his fiction, Barry Lopez has been called a writer who
"goes to the wilderness to clarify a great deal about civilization." Of
Wolves and Men, 1978, which includes not only a great deal of scientific
information, but also wolf lore, superstition, folklore and literature
from a wide range of peoples won the Burroughs Medal for distinguished
natural history writing as well as the Christopher Medal for humanitarian
writing, and was nominated for the American Book Award. River Notes:
The Dance of Herons, 1979, a book of fictional narratives, "is about
a small world of relationships among people, herons, salmon, cottonwoods--and
all creatures drawn to this rushing, tumbling, powerful and endangered
emblem of natural life, the river... . The book is a thing of beauty in
itself, as tantalizingly real and yet as otherworldly as your own reflection
on a river's surface." Winter Count, another work of fiction, has
been praised for turning "the sentiments of a decade's worth of ecology
lovers into a deeply felt and unnervingly powerful picture of reality."
His best-known book is Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern
Landscape, 1987; which won the National Book Award in non-fiction.
It has been called "a lyrical geography and natural history, an account
of Eskimo life, and a history of northern explorations," and a "reflection
about the meaning of mankind's encounter with the planet... . Its question
is whether civilization can find a way of adapting itself to the natural
world before its predilection for adapting the natural world to itself
destroys self and world both." His other books include Desert Notes:
Reflections in the Eye of the Raven, 1976, fictional narratives; Giving
Birth to Thunder, Sleeping With his Daughter: Coyote Builds North
America, 1978, a collection of Native American Trickster stories; Desert
Reservation, 1980, a chapbook; and most recently, Crossing Open
Ground, 1988, a collection of essays. Lopez lives in Finn Rock, Oregon;
this fall he is teaching at Notre Dame.

Barry Lopez will give a talk
at 1:30 p.m. on Wednesday, October 4, in the Newport News Room of Webb
Center, on the relationship between stories and settings, and will read
from his fiction and non-fiction at 8 o'clock that evening in the Mills
Godwin Auditorium. [extracted from 1989 brochure]